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Colleges Signing on for iData Reporting Service

By Dian Schaffhauser

05/04/10

Three colleges have gone public with their adoption of an online service intended to streamline their reporting work. Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA; Simmons College, a small, private university in Boston; and Tarrant County College in Ft. Worth, TX have subscribed to Data Cookbook, a Web-based service that provides a knowledgebase for storing reporting details and facilitating reporting collaboration among users. The service was created by iData, which does consulting to colleges and universities.

"iData's Data Cookbook provides an easy-to-build, easy-to-share, easy-to-audit resource for our college community," said Mary Robbins, associate vice chancellor, Information Services at Tarrant County College. "TCCD selected the Data Cookbook to document and publish the official definitions of our key terms, ensuring that we are all speaking the same language."

The service facilitates best practices in reporting by allowing the institution to create a Data Cookbook account that maintains information on reports and defined terms. When new reports are needed, users walk through a specification form, which is assigned to a developer within the institution. That person specs out the report and returns it to the user for review and approval. The conversation between the two participants is captured by the system. A community area in the service provides standardized reports that can be used by customers.

Pricing for Data Cookbook is $2,400 for an annual license for five users, $4,800 for institutions with fewer than 3,500 full time employees, and $7,200 for institutions larger than that.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.